WordPress 101

Your Website is a Broadcast Channel

Many conversations these days pertain to what the website is for, where the web is going, whether the same strategies from five years ago hold true today. Before the buzzword social media and web 2.0, everyone knew the importance of a list and having regular email communication to their clients and audience. In larger organizations, the web and email may have had much less prominence, as they opted for the traditional print media channels for the client / audience communication.

Today, so much more is possible directly online.

Any business can start small and scale up to meet the needs of a growing business. First and foremost, this must be pointed out. In that same vein of thinking, this list of ideas starts with the beginning entrepreneur in mind, and evolves toward a sophisticated internet site for the business, complete with its own social engagement functionality tied in, and an employee intranet behind a secure login.

Basic Page: Static home page introducing a new business, complete with an embedded YouTube video, and a newsletter sign-up box.What this achieves is minimal, although for some entrepreneurs and products, extraordinary things have happened. At the very least, you have created a landing page with some brief interesting content, with a call-to-action that invites them to sign-up for more information. Ideally, you will send them a Whitepaper or Free Report as a token of appreciation.

Basic Site: Home Page ~ About / Information Page ~ Products / Services Page ~ Contact ~ BlogAt the very least, when you add more to your website and ready to take on the web role more seriously, you want to fill out the information pages with more detail. The About / Information page is not one to be neglected anymore either. With the number of scam artists on the web as well, people are also looking to confirm your identity. Any and all information you add, personalizes the relationship to the web visitor. Speak to the audience that will resonate with you.

The Blog is a key feature to be nurtured on an ongoing basis. Blogging daily is a major plus for search engines, and continually improving your ranking. People hear this all the time. While this holds truth, blogging daily isn’t a reality for most, and not really going to have such a significant impact when reduced to once or twice a week. It’s when you don’t blog at all that it really hurts you. Regularly updated content ensures the search engines are always coming to your site and indexing its pages, thus improving chances of searches landing on your website.

Member Sites: These allow visitors to the website to sign-up, become members, and participate in an online community. When done well, this results in significant opportunities for responding to the market / audience, building loyalty, gaining product insights, and increasing a market-share potential through simple relationship development — not management.

Intranet Sites: These allow companies to extend the social engagement, knowledge share, and employee development across wider regions, improving company performance, business intelligence and process or product improvements through well executed intranet site plans.

These summary points are all about websites intended for one purpose:

Engage Your Audience!

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2 comments for “Your Website is a Broadcast Channel”

I am a professional artist (painter) with limited time. Is a blog and/or member sites important
for selling my paintings on-line? What is The most important for a painter with website/gallery? Thanks for all of your fabulous advice. Jan Law

A member site isn’t so critical, as it takes a great deal of time to interact and manage the community. A blog, however, would still be a critical piece of your website for marketing through social media channels.

With an artist site, you are always updating your online gallery to display new artwork. A blog post, showing the new piece and a link to the gallery item for a full display, provides the artist with a valuable marketing channel.

With each new post, you have new content and links to share via social media. In addition, blogs come with the RSS Feed which others may subscribe to, rather than remembering to come back for a visit.

So I do strongly recommend a blog as a part of your site. An online shop to sell your artwork, and of course, your portfolio.